'I can always call him up and tell him to pull offuntil
I give him a new deadline. Ach, don't bother yourself.
We'll be away and gone by seven o'clock, I'm certain of it.'
Farrell sounded confident enough, but I could sense that under his veneer of calm he was nearly as tense as I was. Thank God, he seemed to have no inkling that a huge net was being spread to capture him and the leading lights of the London ASU.
At least, so I thought, until he started talking again.
'And yourself, now. What are you going to do if you get your people back?'
'Collapse with relief, I should think.'
'Yes, but on the ground — in the flesh, I mean.'
'Drive home, I suppose. I've hardly dared think about it yet.'
'Yes, but your unit…'
'The Regiment? What about them?'
'How will you account for the hostages being let go?'
'I won't know anything about the reason. I'll only know there's been a phone call telling me to get to the
'How will the Legiment contact you to pass on the details?'
'They've got my mobile number.'
'Where do they think you are now?'
'They don't know. I could be anywhere. I'm on leave — they haven't been in touch for days.'
Farrell gave a non-committal grunt. 'And afterwards?'
'As long as your chopper pilot performs properly, we'll make a clean getaway. The murder will be put down to the PIRA, and that'll be that. There'll be nothing to connect it with me. After all, I don't happen to own a five-oh rifle.'
'This house, though… and the other one.'
'We took them in false names, and paid cash.'
'The cars?'
'We changed the plates for the duration of the exercise.'
'All right, so you've done well.'
For the first time in my life I saw Farrell smile. But when he put in a final check-call to one of his mobile numbers, the temperature fell sharply once more.
'They're suspicious,' he said, holding his palm over the receiver. 'They think you're acting in concert with the security forces, and with the military.'
'Ah, bollocks!' I went. 'If the legiment knew what I'm doing, they'd kill me. I've told you, these guys are just friends. Let me speak to him.'
I reached for the phone, but Farrell lifted it back to his ear. 'Sharp wants to talk to you… No? Fair enough.' He covered the mouthpiece again and said, 'He'll speak to another one. Not yourself'
'All right, then. Tony. You talk to him.'
'Not Tony,' Farrell snapped. 'They know about the Yank.'
'Doughnut, then,' I said. 'For fuck's sake, tell him what you do.'
Doughnut was brilliant, very cool and laconic. He'd been waiting for this. 'Yeah, yeah,' he went. 'BGing. Yeah. Bodyguarding… An Arab sheikh… No, I'm not allowed to say which… Only when he's in London… Now? He's in South Africa, on holiday.
That lets me out… He comes here on business, but that's in quotes. It's really to procure women. Bloody amazing they are, too: Zanzibar, Morocco — you name it, he has them…' On he went, mainly about the colossal amounts of money the Arabs threw around.
When he said that the sheikh had twenty-four cars including three lollers and a pre-war Lagonda — in his London garage, the guy on the other end capitulated.
'There you are,' I said to Farrell. 'What did I tell you?
Now, for God's sake, let's all go to bed.'
FIFTEEN
When Doughnut shook my shoulder and brought me a mug of tea at 0500, I couldn't believe I'd ever been asleep. I seemed to have been twisting back and forth all night in spasms of anxiety about things that might go wrong. The worst was that the PIlk would take fright and murder the hostages prematurely; the next worst, that the Prime Minister would get killed by mistake; the third worst — but still unfaceable — was that we'd go through “the whole charade, and then for some reason the lV would fail once more.
I had learned that at 58 Cumberland House specialist technicians from SO19 had completed one penetration of the party wall and successfully introduced a fibre- optic probe into the flat next door. They'd gone through the wall low down — so that there would be less risk of plaster-crumbs making a noise tumbling to the floor when the tip of the drill emerged — and by sheer bad luck it had come out behind a piece of furniture, a sideboard or a free-standing cupboard, moved there since the owner of the apartment had gone abroad. The result was that we still had no positive identification, sO the technicians had begun drilling all over again.
This I'd been told by Yorky, when I had last spoken to him just after midnight. By then he was established in the new control centre, designated Zero Charlie, inside Chequers itself, and sounding well in command of the situation.
After that, with Farrell out of the way in the bedroom, we'd held one last briefing session in the kitchen, squaring away final details: we'd run through: everybody's roles, verified map references and timings cleaned our pistols, checked magazines and made sure that our radios and mobile phones had fully-charged batteries. 'During the shoot,' I told the lads, 'the overriding factor we've got to bear in mind is this: we know we're going to be acting out a charade, but to Farrell every detail has got to seem credible.'
'Eventually, at half-one, we'd gone to get our heads down — but I, for one, couldn't drop off. Every minute that had gone by I was hoping for a call from Yorky to say that the assault on the flat had gone in, the hostages had been safely recovered, and we could stand down our, whole crazy plan. The Greenford operation, I knew, had been named 'Fruit Salad', and the codeword for a successful recovery was 'Bananas'. That would mean both Tim and Tracy were safe.
For hour after hour — or so it seemed — I had lain there thinking of a man patiently drilling through the wall of a room using an old-fashioned bit-and-brace, giving it just half a turn at a time, to make certain no sound would be heard in the flat next door. The process I had envisaged was agonizingly slow — half a turn …. wait… half a turn… wait — the wire-thin bit going in a millimetre or two at a time, the microphones listening all the time for reaction on the far side…
All night I had lain hoping that the three magic syllables — ba-na-nas — would bring our maneuvering to an abrupt end. If that happened, we'd drive Farrell straight to the back door of Chequers, hand him over to the resident security force, and call Doughnut and Stew back to base. The only faint amusement I had got was from the thought of the PIFLA helicopter pilot, sitting in some farmer's field at 0600, waiting endlessly for instructions that would never come. Farrell had let on that the operator of the Jet-P,anger they'd hired had charged them 5,000 pounds in cash, paid in advance, for the morning's run. It was c/ear that the man had realised they were up to no good, because the price was exorbitant.
But since the money probably came from Libya in the first place, 1 couldn't care less.
Now we had a bare half-hour in which to prepare for take-off. I had a wash, got a bowl of raw porridge and milk down my neck, drank a second cup of tea and sorted my kit. Stew was in charge of Farrell at that stage, and when the brute began erring and blinding about being hassled I yelled at him to get hold of himself. 'Ah, sling yourself!' I snapped. 'You can cut that out now.
Once we're in the open I don't want to hear a fucking sound out of you. Otherwise you'll screw up the whole bloody operation.' I could see he was suffering from nerves, li[: e the rest of us, but that didn't make me feel any more charitable towards him.
Outside, my spirits lifted a fraction when I saw that at last the weather had changed. The clouds had gone, leaving the sky brilliantly clear, and high over our heads a jet had spewed out a slim, white trail that reached far to the north. When I moved out of range of the dung- heap the air smelt fresh and clean, and there wasn't a breath of wind. Ifa fine day was to be taken as a sign of hope, we'd got one.